How often should you send newsletters?

Clint and Cosimo's answer from our last "Ask me Anything" with Paid Members

How often should you send a newsletter?
What should email campaigns contain?
Should you send it to all subscribers? 

We were asked these questions in our last “Ask me Anything” session with Paid Sovereign Artist Club members and, as promised, we’ve worked them up in writing into more detailed answers.

While there are no cookie-cutter answers to these questions, there are good guidelines to follow so let's dive into the nuances of these topics so that you can figure out what email marketing approach to take.

How often should you send?

There are two perspectives from which to tackle this question: the technical side and the marketing side.

Let's start with the technical side since it's something not a lot of online creators think about.

Every December, there's a problem in the marketing world: emails are not being delivered. Why is that? Many companies collect email addresses all year long, but send no email campaigns. Nothing all year, and then they wake up just before Christmas, import a huge list of addresses and finally decide to send something—and it doesn't get delivered. The reason is simple: the ISPs (Internet Service Providers), like gmail.com, outlook.com and yahoo.com get flooded with tons of emails from senders they don't recognize, and so they ignore them or filter them out.  Some of these emails have gone dead, cold or become spam traps and the sender didn’t know because they were simply sitting on the list doing nothing with it.  This kills deliverability of the entire campaign.

How is that relevant to you as an artist? You need to send something regularly, so that the ISPs remember you and don't flag your emails as suspicious. That means that at the very bare minimum, you should send at least 1 email every month or 2. This is the absolute bare minimum from the technical standpoint, but it's far from ideal.

OK, that’s the technical side.  Now let’s look at the marketing side…